Genital Grinder (22 page)

Why had I really thought I would know the shape of the end? With such ambition and on such a grand scale, would it not have to be something previously unseen and unforeseen?

Section VII

“Think starlight,” Ursula said. “By the time it gets to us, it’s thousands of years old. Those stars could be dead, but you’d never know it to look at the night sky. We’ll think they’re alive for millennia after they’ve burnt out.”

Lee smirked. “Now there’s a fresh metaphor for you.”

Geoff said, “Personally, I think you’re wasting your time trying to convince him that way. The important thing is that a woman who never existed before was very alive before we ripped her from our reality like a page in a notebook. We believe this wasn’t something anyone could do before the end of the century. Something shifted in the relationship between art and its limits, maybe because it
had
to.”

Ursula wasn’t about to be denied another metaphor. “If you accept the idea that the universe was a clock wound and abandoned by a creator, what happens in the time between when it is stopping and rewound? Maybe something new. We felt it. This wasn’t something we accidentally discovered. We
knew
it would work. We weren’t waiting for the right time, but
no
time. That’s where we are now. Artists all over the world could interpret the same subject to no effect, but when the three of us do it, it
lives.”

Section VIII

The trial and error behind this had been the cause of its obscurity. It was not the kind of thing they wanted to publicly experiment with, because they could not afford any attention before mastery. To do what they’d just done with Rebecca . . . to make her exactly as they wanted . . . wasn’t innate. (I can’t say it took
time
to learn, because by that point there was no longer any such thing.) Their ideology valued art over humanity, and in their hands art was no idle expression awaiting admiration, condemnation, or indifference. Their golems were still hostile, but not toward the authors. It was the audience endangered now. Don’t blame the messenger; kill the recipients. I was like-minded, but that didn’t explain why Ursula wanted me there. The why behind their new talent was of secondary importance to me anyway; I wanted to know
what.
What could be done with it? And
how.
How far could it go?

“Want to try an experiment?” Geoff asked.

Section IX

If somewhere there is a race of almond-eyed extra-terrestrials bending time and space to travel great distances and dislocate the rectums of unlucky homo sapiens with their excruciating probes, perhaps they will land on this planet long after it is deserted and wonder where all the potential rape victims absconded. Maybe they will sift through the ruins to find clues to the great exodus. This would be the first.

From
The Herald,
article by Jackson Zirnheld.

“MAN CLAIMS ASSAULT BY ANIMATED VILLAIN”

While walking home from work, Peter Swaggerty was undeniably attacked. Beyond that, the facts are difficult to establish. Swaggerty insists that his broken limbs and extensive bruising resulted from the assault of a figure he claimed was an animated drawing.

“Sure, I know it sounds crazy,” he concedes, “but I know what I saw. It was like some kind of insane dream that I still haven’t woken up from.” He describes his assailant as “sleek and very powerful. We’ve all seen him for years on those old neighborhood watch signs, the guy who’s a black silhouette except for his crazy eyes. He’s the one who attacked me last night, as if he stepped right off the sign to pummel me. He looks like that Marvin the Martian cartoon in his face, but Marvin the Martian never said stuff like ‘I’m gonna pull your entrails right through your [backside].’”

Swaggerty suffered six cracked ribs, eight broken fingers, elaborate facial damage, a dislocated shoulder, a compound ulnar fracture, and two broken legs as he attempted to crawl away. He was walking the three blocks to his house from his job at a movie theater when he was ambushed on Bava Lane.

“No one will believe this, I know, but that guy’s still out there, and he’ll keep taking people down. I’ll be scared to walk the streets when I get out of here. From now on, I’m taking the bus.”

Police declined to comment on how seriously they are taking Swaggerty’s account of events.

Section X

It was the best review we could have asked for. Peter Swaggerty had seen what we could do, and he was afraid. Everyone was laughing at him, of course, and there would be no reappearance of this mysterious hybrid of Marvin the Martian and Edmond Kemper, but the skeptics would learn in time. It went like we’d hoped. Lee sculpted him, and Ursula and Geoff painted before and after representations of his violence to Swaggerty, whose routine they had noticed months ago. We probably didn’t have to model the victim after a person we recognized, but to be on the safe side we did. Swaggerty might have invented the dialogue, but maybe that was the kind of thing a black silhouette with crazy eyes was born to say. Lee speculated that Blackie (as we called him) used Swaggerty as the author of his own pain. After that, we took more chances in preparation for our masterpiece. I gave my input on what we might utilize in these unorthodox manifestations, such as the neighborhood watch assailant (which had always haunted me as a child; being kidnapped was my worst fear), but I could contribute little else. Lee, Geoff, and Ursula worked tirelessly, and the experiments multiplied.

A steel incarnation of Baphomet showed up at a highly publicized environmentalist festival, resulting in the deaths of six at the hooves of the uninvited guest and another twelve trampled as by-standers fled, screaming in abject terror. Blood, it turns out, was not seen as very “green.’ A midnight screening of
Demons
was interrupted when a helicopter inexplicably crashed through the theater roof. Miraculously, the propellers continued whirling, and a full house was treated to the privilege of live decapitations and torso halving (provided they weren’t the decapitatees and halvees). No crew members were ever found, nor was anyone ever able to determine where exactly the chopper had come from. That something almost identical happened in the movie was actually comforting to many, as though it proved it was simply a bizarre stunt rather than a paranormal phenomenon. No interpretations were offered for the letters EOTA painted on the side of the helicopter. The dream factory of the Gard Theater proved tragically cruel for another audience, some of whom were ground up in its cogs in something that would ultimately be called “the Gard Incident”. A teenager texting a friend (about something nobody cared about even after what happened) suddenly stood up, shrieking that she couldn’t see. Her boyfriend and another friend on her row came to her aid, while other jaded movie-goers told her to shut her trap. They needn’t have worried. The friend (the recipient of the text, two seats away) held her illuminated cell phone screen up to the screaming girl’s face. The faint blue glow revealed busy spools of blood gushing down her cheekbones. Her friends promptly joined her in a choir of ear-splitting hysteria (the boyfriend arguably more so). Someone else’s makeshift cell phone flashlight added some unfortunate radiance to the macabre display, just in time for the spectators to get a better view of the girl’s jaw suddenly unhinge from her skull. It was as though the integrity of her flesh and joints failed her instantaneously, the skin elongating like cheese from a slice of pizza. The weight of the jaw proved too much for the thinning strand, and the lower half of her face dropped to the floor of the auditorium. Now the screaming really began. By now, everybody close to this row had their cell phones trained on the cluster of the three of them. The girl with no mandible dropped back in her seat in a dead faint and, as one witness said, basically “exploded” on impact. Her head dropped one row back as if the top of her seat had been a samurai sword, and it careened into the lap of someone who hadn’t had to get up from his seat to see the action, his free jumbo popcorn refills now a non-factor indeed. The trunk of her body splashed in myriad directions, a torrent of splatter like a tire shooting rain water up the side of a road. The friend, who now could have been a stand-in for Sissy Spacek in
Carrie
after the bucket dropped . . . if the bucket had been a bathtub . . . stood glued to the spot by the strange surplus of blood—surely far more than normally part of the human condition—unleashed from the bag of flesh with whom she’d entered this theater. Muscle memory even now allowed her fingers to walk on the keypad of her phone to inform somebody, anybody, that OMG, it was a massacre (to which she received the strange response “LOLZ” from an unknown number). She vomited from the sheer unthinkable horror. By this point, nobody was left standing around to play “best boy grip” with the surrogate lighting scheme, but the screen still provided enough light to see that the emesis was the color of the carpets in the atrium—a deep crimson. She instinctively reached for the (now ex) boyfriend, who was backing away from the tableau in what seemed like slow motion. He yanked his free hand away from the girl. Her hand came with him from the elbow down. He stopped backing away and
ran
for the end of the aisle, heedless of the debris of his ex-girlfriend still cluttering the way. The disembodied forearm burst beneath his shoe, and the backsplash of blood corroded his calves in quick succession. His momentum earned him one step, and then his leg wrenched itself away from the knee up, the foot still planted. It tipped over like an overloaded coat rack. He had nothing but the stump to come down upon, and as the now legless half of his body struck the seats to either side of him, he emulated the hot new trend of bodily decimation unwittingly started by his girlfriend. “Come on!” someone shouted above the chaos.
“Let’s all go to the fucking lobby!”

But nothing else happened. This virus or biological weapon or whatever it was seemed isolated to just the three of them. A government agency most of the general public had never heard of before shut the theater down and quarantined the auditorium. All of the ticketholders are still being examined at an undisclosed location while biological experts look for the elusive “Gard Factor,” wishing to hell they’d gone to a matinee instead. (The “matinee” thing is conjecture, but the rest—right down to the line about the lobby, which I am proud to say was my own contribution—went directly as written, painted, and painstakingly sculpted over a series of weeks. I kept one of Lee’s fragmented body sculptures . . . like a mini Han Solo in carbonite, dropped and shattered into tiny pieces.)

There seemed to be a lot of mass hysteria going around by that point. You would almost think it was a communicable disease with its own variation of a flu season. The barely repressed panic had returned. I was hearing it in conversations at work while I wrote pamphlets I did not comprehend. I was seeing it in the relief of my neighbors when they made it back to their apartments without being beaten and sodomized by a cartoon. It was in everybody’s sudden mistrust of cell phones (and movie theaters), and the deep reluctance to go anywhere that a lot of people were gathered.

The success of the Gard Incident convinced it was time for our masterwork at last. We started by putting something different on the canvas and in the clay: ourselves.

Section XI

I agreed to go first, and the effect was instantaneous—needle-like punctures over my chest, like a mouthful of extended teeth perforating the skin. It looked like my heart had grown teeth and was attempting to gnaw itself out of me (see figure 11.1), with the ossific slivers simultaneously serving as an alien suture to seal the aperture. Such a disfiguration would disgust anyone who saw it, but Kathaaria changed all that.

Kathaaria was why Ursula wanted my contribution. My fascination with disease had impressed her with a vague poetic passion.

The results we wanted could not be adequately illustrated. Perhaps there could be a view of Earth as seen from space with mushroom clouds expanding all over, but why should we submit ourselves to such a conflagration? You can’t imagine the plans we have for a world running on a different clock. So how do we really draw the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem for those who won’t be included? Well, along with Lee’s molding of a triple-helix viral cell and Geoff and Ursula’s portrayals of its effects, that is the purpose of this pamphlet
. The disease known as Kathaaria has a contagion rate of 100% among people without the deformity described above.

Don’t blame the messenger, but like I said, this never happened. It wasn’t written, and you aren’t reading it. It’s after the end of the world. For those in the next one, though, the suffering we have shaped for you will be very real, as you will see described below in the
First Indications of Infection
.